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I can understand both of those. I think there's always anger when it just doesn't seem fair. My mom had a long period of knowing she was going to die. That changed the rest of her life, and changed the way people related to her... and in many ways, for the better. She didn't let herself be sick or feel sorry for herself, and lived life to the fullest. But for a more fearful person, like my grandpa, it made him depressed to know he was going to slowly dwindle. He spent his last months afraid and depressed.

My step-dad Frank, on the other hand, surprised everyone by having an anneurism. No warning at all. Easy for him, surprising for us. It's something we talked about when mom was sick right at the end, that we'd like to go quick and without warning... maybe be hit by a truck... Something immediate so we would never lay there dying, never to wake, while people sat around and stared at us. Maybe that sounds strange, but Frank and I spent an eternal 24 hours with my mom at the end - where she was starkly different than she was in life... unconscious, lungs filling with fluid, seizures - and it was a hard time to know what to do with.

So when Frank died so suddenly, I thought good for him... he died on the way to the kitchen.

It's what Lincoln said: "For us, the living."

The dead have moved on, have made that leap, or stroll, to the Rainbow Bridge to collect their loved ones, and then, perhaps, over the Bridge to the next Big Thing.

It's us, the living, still here, with only a vague notion of that Big Thing, who grieve and struggle with the hard parts of this life.

And, yeah, once the funeral was over and I lost the almost insurmountable urge to vigorously and repeatedly apply a two-by-four upside assorted crania, I realized I was angry at my daddy for dying before I could say what needed saying. (I was also angry at all those other people, but that's another story.)